In a brilliant example of multidisciplinary research, Harvard Medical School’s Shawn Douglas, Ido Bachelet, and George Church combined forces to build nanostructures that would mimic the body’s immune system to recognize cancer cells and trick them into self-destructing. Their research is published today in Science but the discovery didn’t just happen overnight. It’s the culmination of several key discoveries going back several years, by researchers around the globe.

There are many different types of proteins that get made inside of human cells, including structure proteins, such as keratin and collagen, enzymes, and messenger proteins such as hormones. One large group that I forgot to mention, and that intrigues me the most, is the wide variety of different antibodies that get made in our blood cells. There are over a billion different types of antibodies that get made over the course of a lifetime, and each is able to identify antigens from foreign objects, such as viruses or bacteria, and elicits an immune response.